Gratitude: Friends

“Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’

‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

~ E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

I have often felt deprived in certain parts of my life: in love, in wealth, and general good fortune. The one constant blessing and gift that I have had is the fact that I indisputably have the best of friends.

Day 5: I have been, am now, and forever will be, grateful for my circle of friends. The circle is eclectic and diverse, filled with strong ass women and the most gentle and protective of men.

Most of my friendships have withstood the tests of time, distance, and circumstances. And the newer friendships I have made, I have been fortunate to have met people who genuinely have good hearts, people who have shown me that true friendship does not require a history, and they have shown that people can truly care about you even after knowing you for a short period of time.

(made by a lifelong friend in 2000)

Gratitude: Healing

“Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed.” ~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Last year G was cutting herself. The skin on her arms had become red and raised from the constant trauma she inflicted on her own flesh. It hurt me to look at them because it was a blatant indication of how much she was suffering inside. I had asked her why she cut herself and she said it was to dull the internal pain she was feeling. The physical pain of the flesh made it easier to bear the pain of her mind and soul.

Day 4: I am grateful for the healing process G is experiencing, both inside and out. The skin on her arms is no longer raw. The scars are still clearly there, but her skin has smoothed out. At the beginning of her healing journey, she wore a lot of long-sleeved shirts. She said she felt embarrassed of her arms since the scars were so telling of how they came to exist. She now wears regular shirts and even tank tops. She does not flash her scars, but she does not go to lengths to hide them either. She says that the scars are now a part of who she is, and she has expressed a few times of how she feels proud of what she has overcome.

I am not naive, however, and am fully aware of the steps forward and the steps backward in the healing process. Some days are better than others, but the bad days remarkably have become less and less.

Gratitude: Air Travel

“Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean when you think about it jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research blood sweat tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

But get on any flight in the country and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who in the face of all that incredible achievement will be willing to complain about the drinks.” ~ Jim Butcher, Summer Knight

Day 3: I am grateful that air travel was invented. I am able to travel at least twice a year to see my family in the Philippines. I am grateful that I can fly to nearly everywhere on Earth. I am grateful for all the air travel that I have been privileged to take, and I look forward to discovering more places in the future.

Gratitude: Plants

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Day 2: I am grateful for a newly acquired skill of being able to keep plants alive. A former certified plant-killer, I am reformed and have now successfully kept four plants alive for nearly a year. For those with green thumbs, this probably makes you laugh, but for me, this is a major accomplishment. Every day, I wake up and check on my plant babies. I turn their pots around daily so that a different part of their leaves gets sunlight.

Forty Days of Gratitude

“The season of Lent is the time for us to take a journey; an inward journey. The season of Lent is as the prophet Joel writes, “a time for us to rend our hearts and not our clothing.” It is a time for self-examination; a time to get to know ourselves a little better. Often times for Lent people will give up a favorite food, or some other form of self-sacrifice. These things are all well and good IF they come from the heart, IF they are a true attempt to re-connect with the Spirit inside us. Otherwise, we are simply “rending” our clothes.” ~ Rev. R.J. Hronek, 47 Days: A Lenten Devotional and Journaling Guide

This year I decided that I am not going to give up anything, but rather, I am going to attempt to do something challenging, something enduring, for forty days.

My challenge this Lent Season is to write down one thing each day for which I am grateful.

Day 1: Today, I am grateful for my job. I had my annual review earlier today, and I found out today that I am valued by my firm. It felt lovely to be praised and acknowledged by the people with whom I spend so many days of my life.

Daily Prompt 2023-02-08

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.” ~ John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

dailyprompt

Is there anything you feel too old to do anymore?

I am too old now to waste time on trivial matters. I am too old to say “yes” when I really mean “no.” I am too old to be in one-sided relationships, whether it be with friends, family, or co-workers. I am too old to be using my feelings of guilt to be the catalyst of whether I do something or not do something. I am too old to compromise parts of myself just to make others happy.

My Liberation Notes

“Sometimes, when you’re so sad you don’t know what to do, it helps to be angry.” ~ Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

The stress of my life follows me even into sleep.

The other night I dreamt that I was working late in the office. I had to use the bathroom, but saw that the night janitor was cleaning it, so I decided to use the bathroom on another floor. I go to the next floor, and as I enter the bathroom, I hear two men enter the bathroom. They are laughing and talking loudly, with one saying something about hoping to find a woman in the bathroom that he can molest. The bathroom is a maze, and I quickly, but quietly, run through the maze and hide. The two men do not find me, but I wake up in a sweat, feeling like I had just escaped being raped and murdered.

The lack of good sleep, coupled with violent and turbulent dreams, has made me short-tempered and angry. I suppress those feelings though around my daughter because she is so fragile. I am a bundle of nerves and exhaustion and frustration, but I hide it deep down, and always act cheerful and positive, especially around her.

I have a lot of dark thoughts, and I use prayer to calm myself. Admittedly, it does not always work. I have no real outlet for anything. No one to whom I can cry and shout and vent my feelings of failure. I just trod on, like a good little solider, do my work, call my parents often, check-in with friends, cheer on my daughter, all while I am feeling nothing but emptiness for myself.

I recently watched a Korean drama, My Liberation Notes. In the series, the main character, starts a club where the members write in a journal about all the things that they think will liberate them from their misery.

This made me think about my own life. What is it exactly from my life that I want to be liberated? I thought about it some, but have not yet solved that question. In the meantime, I started a boxing class. It has only been two weeks, but already it has helped tremendously. I sweat and punch out all my negative and dark feelings. And while only temporary, at least I feel liberated while I am punching out my emotions.

To Hell and Back

“Razors pain you,

Rivers are damp,

Acids stain you,

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful,

Nooses give,

Gas smells awful.

You might as well live.”

~ Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope

I realize now that I have not written here since the end of 2021, and now it is 2023.

It is because I was in hell all of last year. 2022 was my year of personal hell.

In January 2022, I found my daughter in her room dangling from her neck, minutes away from death. Her face was blue and she had almost lost consciousness. Fortunately my brother was there and he held up her body as I unraveled the bed sheets from around her neck.

Thirty minutes before that, she had told me she was hungry and wanted to order McDonald’s. I was not happy as I had already made breakfast and told her that she should not be eating so much fast food. She muttered something unintelligible, went into her bedroom, and slammed the door.

The delivery guy came. I went to her room and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again, this time louder. No answer again. I tried the door knob. She had locked the door. I felt like something was wrong.

My brother was visiting and I told him that I felt like something was wrong. He picked her lock, and that was when we found her. She had tied bedsheets around her neck and hung herself from the steel window bars.

If she had not ordered food, we may have found her too late.

I spent much of last year taking her to different therapists and doctors. She was prescribed some antidepressants, which she refused to take. She slashed her arms multiple times. I lived in a constant state of fear and worry. Every day I was sure that that day was going to be the day that I would lose her forever.

After over twenty years of not going to church, I started going last year. Every Sunday, I went to church and prayed to God to save my daughter. I prayed non-stop to a God that I had hated for over two decades ever since I lost my sister to cancer.

I urged my daughter to also turn to God. She even joined a youth ministry. Things were starting to look up for her, but then the youth minister started sending her inappropriate messages. She became disgusted with the church, and she and her fellow female colleagues stopped attending the youth services. Eventually, the priest was sent away, and she and her colleagues slowly started coming back to church.

A year later, my daughter is better. She is still healing and still fragile. I am also still healing and still live in a constant state of anxiety and fearful with the thought that my daughter may slip back into a dark hole. Praying to God helped me and my daughter last year. I will continue to pray this year.

Christmas Eve

“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
~ Clement Clarke Moore, Twas the Night Before Christmas

It is Christmas Eve, in the year of our Lord 2021.

I was able to fly home to the Philippines to finally see my parents whom I have not seen since before the pandemic in 2019.

Travelling here was no small feat.

Last Sunday, I made an appointment to get an RT-PCR test at 12:00 noon. I arrived at the testing site at 11:40 a.m. thinking that I would be about fifteen minutes early and be done by 12:03 as the place had promised. “Appointments are 3 minutes or less.”

But when I arrived there, it turned out that about fifty other people also had a 12:00 noon appointment, and there were only five testing personnel.

We all ended up waiting outside in the bitter cold for almost an hour. The actual swabbing test itself did take less than 3 minutes. A cotton swab swirl in one nostril, a swish in the other nostril, boom, bam, done.

I paid $175.00 for guaranteed results in 24 hours or less. I figured that was plenty of time for my early morning Tuesday flight. I did not have to be at the airport until about 23:00 on Monday night. However, as Monday afternoon turned into Monday evening and the time was getting close for me to start to worry, I suddenly started feeling sick, mostly with anxiety that (a) I would not receive my results in time, and (b) that I actually tested positive since I had been in the same vicinity as people in my office who had tested positive earlier in the week.

It was not until about 20:00 that I finally received my negative results.

Off to the airport I go. Once I arrived to check into my flight, the agent told me that the Philippines was only accepting passengers that were current Filipino passport holders or former Filipinos with proof of birth in the country.

“Please produce a copy of your Philippine birth certificate, or you will be denied boarding on the flight.”

Wait, what?

I thought I had read the travel requirements carefully, but apparently I had missed that requirement. I was thinking to myself how the f*ck was I going to be able to produce my birth certificate at that very moment. I definitely did not have enough time to go home and come back.

And then I had remembered Google docs. I had scanned a bunch of important documents and saved them onto my Google docs account. I logged into my account from my phone and there I was at the airport, sweating and praying that I had scanned my birth certificate.

There it was. I had scanned my birth certificate and saved it on my account sometime in 2011.

Crisis averted. I produced a copy of my birth certificate, boarded the plane, and settled into my seat. The flight was nearly eighteen hours long, but the sheer stress of the last thirty-six hours exhausted me to the point that I had slept through about ten hours during the flight.

When we landed on Philippine soil, we were immediately escorted to this large area that had the Philippine coast guard there. We were approached by guards who checked our papers and asked us a series of questions regarding our health. We were then instructed to complete an application for a OneHealth pass that you would have to carry for the duration of your time in the country. I had completed the application days in advance, but it was never approved because they had sent a follow-up email to me asking if I was pregnant, but I did not see that email because I had been on a plane for the last eighteen hours.

After about three more health station checks, I was escorted to the baggage area to claim my luggage, and after that, I was immediately taken outside to the official government taxi stand and then whisked off to my hotel where I am now to undergo a mandatory six day quarantine period (swabbing on the fifth day, plus one day to receive the results).

I am to be here until Monday, December 27. I will be spending Christmas locked in a hotel room.

Progress

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” ~ Tony Kushner, Perestroika

The move to my new apartment this past July was really difficult for me. Firstly, I did everything by myself. While I did have movers to lift and transport the heavy stuff, I did all the packing and unpacking and rearranging on my own.

The idea of cleaning out my old apartment felt good at first. I had felt like I was shedding dead parts and growing into a new and improved version of myself. I called a junk removal service and scheduled a day for them to come and take away all those items that I no longer needed or wanted to bring into my new space. But when that day came, I panicked and I ended up directing them to take away far less than I had originally planned. As a result, I was still stuck with an apartment full of items and furniture that needed to be discarded. The stress of having wasted time and money on the failed removal project started to weigh heavily on me and I felt as though I could not continue. All I wanted to do was to go to sleep and never wake up as the task of completely cleaning out my old apartment felt too monumental for me to accomplish.

Somehow, I was able to pick myself up and just get it done. The next step was to unpack at my new place. The excitement of moving into a brand new space did not last long as the unpacking process was a brutal reminder of how alone I really was in this world. With the pandemic and health safety concerns, I really did not feel like asking for any help and instead unpacked and set up the entire apartment all by myself. I cried on many nights, drowning in self-pity that I had no one to help me with putting away things on high shelves or to help me lift heavy stuff like the mattress. The moving process made me miss the convenience of having someone like my ex who was very house-handy, and that led to me pining for him, even though I knew it was not really him that I missed. I just missed having a body around to help me. Mostly I just wished for someone to just be there.

After a lot of tears and sweat, I managed to get it all done.

It came along, slowly, but I did it.

I now look forward to spending cozy warm nights in my new home.